When accessibility and standards collide.

While reading up on the New Zealand government's web guide lines, I happened to notice that the guidelines state "The site should, where possible, be tested using Access Technology", in other words be tested in Bobby or a similar system.
Fair enough, its all there in black and white, "it is vital that all potential users of government web services are able to access sites". Why should Web designers stop Gladys King, the 78yr old grandma from Omaru on her P166 Windows 95 machine with 32megs of ram, from trying to find the Ministry of Health's new National Immunisation Schedule? Nothing, expect of course if its implied that the site has to be "Bobby AAA Approved".

 

While experimenting with CSS based layouts from Blue Robot, Glish and the noodle incident, I stumbled onto the thought that if indeed the layout/stylesheet degraded gracefully, then it would in fact be bobby "Bobby AAA Approved" if I could that "degraded look" to be usable, clients would love me, Zeldman would adore me for my use of stylesheets, Jakob Nielsen might buy me a drink and the world would be a brighter place for all.
So after testing my page in IE 5, 5.5, 6, Opera 6, Netscape 3, 4.75, 4.76, 6 and Kmeleon 0.6 on Windows XP or 2000, with the help of James I was able to test IE 5 and Netscape 4.7 on the Mac [OS9.1], to make sure that the page is usable across browsers and platforms, and of course W3c XHTML and CSS validators, we now have the W3c, "Bobby AAA Approved" can actually kind of use it in Netscape 3 page that doesn't look to shabby.

 

Yay! For us.